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Are the latest Ranking Reports counting the new large format site links as positions?

Received my weekly ranking report this morning and noticed a specific keyword that I've been ranking in the 3rd or 4th spot has dropped a significant amount of positions. I tested the results myself and it appears the site links of the manufacturer are being counted as positions? My keyword has me in the 3rd position (although it is much lower on the physical page now because of the new format).

I'm really wondering how this will affect organic listings going forward - this new format could be a game changer.

7 Responses

Totally agree with you Jamie regarding it being a game changer. Branded terms where competitors were trying to rank organically are now seriously pushed down due to jumbo sitelinks. For local businesses, Google is also embeddeding local place page snippets - it ends up taking up half of the SERP real estate!

I imagine it will get harder for SERP trackers to scrape - needing to differentiate between large sitelinks and actual organic listings.

I think this is also Google's way of saying, "Hey, you want to compete with brand terms and be relevant on the SERP, you need to be using Adwords." Going to pay really close attention to my first page organic visits over the next few weeks and see how getting pushed down further on the page affects our traffic.

Perhaps.. but I think this is really connected to being 'good for the user' - as cliche as it sounds. If Google sees clickstream abnormally 'high' for position 1 for brand terms, then they are sure this is what the user wants.. so why not expand those site-links to allow for better landing pages for the user. When searching for 'Gap' why not already have the options for 'mens', 'womens', 'baby', etc. And when searching for 'nordstroms shoes' - why not already have the option for 'boots', 'sandals', 'pumps', etc.

Personally I think its a good thing for people to find what they want faster.

I'd bet 95% of people would not be happy landing on an affiliate site when they meant to find the brand site..

This is an interesting issue! I'm not sure if it's how we want to be calculating rankings, so I'm going to open up a customer service request about this and try to look into it ASAP. Thanks for letting us know! I'll get back to you over email at your PRO email address. Talk to you then!

If you could include me in on the answer - I'd appreciate it also. I just noticed this on some of my keywords for sites that aren't big brand names, but have the keyword in their URL. Pushed me down 5 or 6 spots on the first page.

So, we recently released a fix for our tools that solves this issue of counting those site links towards the top 10. If you do see this happening in your rankings in SEOmoz, though, feel free to email us at help@seomoz.org any time. Thanks again for the heads up Jamie!

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